Fabrice's weblog

PLINQ presentation: A query language for data parallel programming

Joe Duffy works on parallel libraries, infrastructure, and programming models in Microsoft's Developer Division. This involves doing prototyping on PLINQ, a set of extensions to LINQ that automatically optimizes and parallelizes query operations based on dynamic runtime information.

Joe gave a presentation about PLINQ and has published the PPT on his blog. Here is the overview he gives about PLINQ:

Microsoft’s language integrated query (LINQ) technology provides an expressive syntax and suite of APIs which facilitate classic data parallel operations: filtering, mapping, reductions, loop tiling, sorts, nested loops parallelism, prefix scans, and more.  In this talk, we look at a new set of extensions to the LINQ technology, called parallel LINQ (PLINQ), which automatically optimizes and parallelizes query operations based on dynamic runtime information.  We believe that the use of a familiar SQL-like syntax will broaden the reach of PLINQ in industry, and provides programmers with a more declarative and flexible way of expressing data-intensive computations.

The presentation shows how PLINQ integrates with LINQ, introduces PLINQ's specific additional query operators and outlines the strategies that can be used for parallelization.
PLINQ is not for today, but may well be the future.